Thursday, April 7, 2011

Milestone

We've reached what I would consider a milestone on the house. Since the first time I truly reviewed our plans I have been worrying about the 21 foot 6x16 PSL beam they called for on the front of the house. How much would it cost? Will we have to rent a crane? If so how much will that cost? How much will it weigh? But getting to the point when we were ready for the beam felt like it was so far away that I tried not to freak out to much about it and just let those questions answer themselves when we got there. That time has arrived and although it was a bit of money and work, it turns out I've got some good friends, neighbors and family that helped make the process bearable... almost fun.

For starters, and old friend of mine from Jr. High and High School works at a somewhat local lumbar yard. He was able to save me $100 on the beam compared to the quote I got from other places. Huge Thanks to Oliver for that! When I got the beam home, my father and I were preping it by cutting it to lenght and notching it for the bracket while we waited for my brother to arrive. My neighbor from across the street came over to see if we needed help. Our original plan was to just slide it up to the roof and get some friends from work to come by on Thursday to help get it up before the expected rain on Friday. Well as we were doing that another neighbor showed up, then a third. Now there was six of us and it was already on the roof so we decided to go for it and put it all the way up.

The Beam is huge! At least to me it is and luckily the largest beam in the house is now up and looking good. The 6x16 kind of makes the 6x12 it's next to look small. One note, we decided to get this beam in before we replaced the ceiling joist* so that we can pull a trap across it before the rain. With the high center ridge beam, it will help the rain run off and not collect in pockets on the roof. We were not expecting rain for two days but when I checked the weather report at midnight the update said it would start raining by noon on Thursday. So I had to get up at 5am to get the tarp secured and ready before I left for work. It was kind of a pain to do alone but if I did not do it the 30% chance of rain would for sure turn into 100%.

Now that this major point in the construction is done we can finish hanging the roof rafters and sheet them and that will really be the start to what the house will look like.

*I did hang the 5 ceiling joist on the new front addition so that we could have a platform to stand on while installing the ridge beam.